Michael Godfrey and Samantha Leonard hold the taegukgi, the flag of South Korea.

Samantha Leonard and Michael Godfrey are typical Michigan Tech students—smart, hard-working,
with all-American families cheering them on. But they were born in Korea and adopted
as infants by their American parents.

Recently they went on separate odysseys to their homeland. One of their goals: to
find their birth families.

Leonard had been dreaming of meeting her birth family almost as long as she can remember.
“When I was little, it was a huge deal,” she recalls. “My parents told me I could
go looking for them when I got older.”

Her adoptive parents, Thomas and Debra Leonard of Canton, Mich., did their best to
help their daughter connect with her Korean heritage. When she was still a preschooler,
they sent her to a summer camp that focused on Korean culture, where she learned to
use chopsticks by using them to pick up Starburst candies. “We could only eat the
ones we picked up,” she explains.

When she started school in Ann Arbor, her parents enrolled her in a Saturday morning
Korean School. “That was terrifying,” Leonard recalls. “It was for second and third-generation
kids who spoke Korean at home. It was way over my head.”

She quit Korean School when she was in fifth grade, but attended Sae Jong Korean camp
each summer. By the time she reached high school, Leonard had learned that the Korean
school offered an adult program that taught beginning Korean to English speakers,
so she re-enrolled.

Unlike Leonard, Michael Godfrey wasn’t particularly interested in Korea. He knew he
was adopted, and he didn’t consider it a big deal. One of only three or four Asian
students in his middle and high school, he says, “I just wanted to be like everyone
else.”

But toward the end of high school, he began to feel that something major was missing
from his life. So, when he was 16, Godfrey signed up for tae kwon do lessons. “That
was my first attempt to do anything Korean,” he recalls.

Then the teenager discovered the Global Overseas Adoptees Link (GOAL), run by Korean
adoptees who grew up in countries outside Korea. GOAL sponsored a travel program
called First Trip Home, taking adoptees from many lands back to Korea for three days
in December 2008, with all expenses paid by the Korean government. Godfrey signed
up, but it turned out to be during finals week at Tech, and he had to cancel his travel
plans.

The Korean agency that placed him with his American parents, Jay and Jennifer Godfrey
of Highland, Mich., had contacted the teenager’s birth family to tell them he was
coming on First Trip Home. “Then they had to call back and tell them I wasn’t,” says
Godfrey.

Another First Trip Home was scheduled for the summer of 2009. Although the Korean
government wasn’t picking up the $1,500 airfare this time, another program did, and
in August 2009, Godfrey headed off for two weeks in the land of his birth.

“It was a weird experience,” he recalls. “Everyone looked Korean, but they didn’t
sound or act Korean. They sounded French or Italian or American—wherever they had
grown up.”

When Godfrey left for Korea, he didn’t really expect to meet his birth family, but
he hadn’t been in Korea long when someone from GOAL informed him: “You have a brother
and a sister, and you are going to meet your birth family in about three days.”

Study-Abroad Takes Samantha “Home”

Meanwhile, Leonard had been admitted to the University of Michigan and transferred
to Michigan Tech to study materials science and engineering. She thought a lot about
the long-anticipated journey to search for her roots. She also wanted to study overseas.
So she decided to combine the two projects.

Working through Michigan Tech’s Study Abroad Program, Leonard was accepted for a semester
at Yunsei University in Seoul, where she fulfilled her Tech humanities requirement
by studying Korean history, language and culture—in Korean. A host family agreed to
help her with her Korean if she would teach them English.

But the search for her birth family soon hit a roadblock. Leonard wrote a letter to
her birth mother, which her American adoption agency hand-delivered to its counterpart.
After a long wait, she received an email from the Korean adoption agency.

“They said they found a woman with the same name as my birth mother, but she was from
a different province. My social worker said that my papers were wrong , so my birth
mother’s age, name, or place of residence could be incorrect,” Leonard recalls. ”They
said there was nothing more they could do.”

Michael Meets His Korean Family

In Korea, on the day he was due to meet his birth family, Godfrey took special care
with his hair and clothes. Then he took the subway to the meeting, more excited than
nervous. He arrived drenched with sweat in the steamy August weather.

Up until then Godfrey had been told that when he was born, his birth parents were
getting a divorce and decided to give him up for adoption to give him a chance at
a better life. During the minutes before their reunion, a social worker told him
the true story: that his mother had been in a coma after he was born and was not expected
to live.

“That changed my entire picture of the people I was about to meet,” he says. “It was
very disorienting, like pulling one of the support beams of my life out from under
me.”

By that time he could see shadows through the agency’s big frosted-glass door.Then the door swung open, and “this little woman, a complete stranger, is standing
there in tears,” Godfrey recalls. ”She rushed over and hugged me. My shirt had dried
by then, but she was drenching it again.”

He met his 18-year-old brother, a whiz kid who had completed a computer engineering
certificate at the age of 9 and now was studying physics at the university. He also
met his 15-year old sister.

Godfrey spent the next day and a half with his Korean family, while a GOAL volunteer
interpreted. He learned that his Korean name is Sang-ho Lee. The family bought a
cake to celebrate their first “birthday” with the son they hadn’t seen for 20 years.
“We ate it with chopsticks,” he recalls, laughing.

“I can’t say I felt like part of the family, but it felt like I had a place there,”
Godfrey says. “They were ecstatic to have found me, and I was pretty happy about
it myself.”

Now Godfrey writes letters to his birth family. GOAL provides translation services.
He tells them about Michigan Tech, about his classes and his daily life in the US.
“I am trying to learn a little Korean,” he says. “Deep down, I think they want me
to be more Korean than I am,” he says. “I want that to be part of me, but I’m an American.”

Samantha is Satisfied

When the adoption agency threw up its hands, Leonard gave up on locating her birth
mother, but she did manage to locate her foster mother, who cared for little Lee Hye
Young until the Leonards adopted her.

“Even though I was unsuccessful in finding my birth mother, I’m not too upset,” she
says. “It’s not as important to me as it was when I was younger and being able to
meet my foster mom was worth all the effort because it meant the world to her. I also
became really close to my host family, so I feel like I’ve gained much more than I
might have lost.”

In the spirit of paying it forward, Leonard works as a counselor at a Korean summer
camp for Korean-American children, where she leads the Korean culture class. “A majority
of these kids, maybe 60 or 70 percent, have never been to Korea, and I feel like my
experience in Korea really made an impression,” she says.” It was really good for
them to see my pictures and learn about the little differences you won’t see in tour
books and videos.”

Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than
7,000 students from 60 countries around the world. Founded in 1885, the University
offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology,
engineering, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics,
and social sciences. Our beautiful campus in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula overlooks
the Keweenaw Waterway and is just a few miles from Lake Superior.